Veg and print

It's the time of year when ripening veg invade the windowsills of our house and printmakers have to take second place!

The tomato plants all decided to get blight and 'Tomato Moths' at the same time and so we harvested the lot (a lot) and left the plants outside for the caterpillars to finish off!  This means that every space has trays of tomatoes of every shade between green and red and I really hope they all go red as we still have some of last years green tomato chutney in the cupboard...

...and the pepper plants got really bad greenfly all of a sudden - it must be an end of season thing - so you can just see the fruits lying on the windowsill getting redder by the day...

...and the squashes (my not so secret favourite thing to grow and then stockpile along with the logs ready for winter) are just having a final warm indoor ripening session before being stored away ready for winter feasts that will be needed in the far distant future.

Oh, and I made some prints too.  But really I'm more interested in the squashes and the stockpiling...

hoarding

We had such a bad start to growing this year.
In the spring I had decided to grow lots of different types of squash, because I love eating them and I also love hoarding them at the end of the summer.
After tending the baby plants in the house until the end of May I finally released them into the wild, only for the slugs (often the size of small snakes) to devour half the plants as well as all the cucumbers and green courgettes - they left the yellow ones!
Most of the squashes that survived have turned out to be 'Festival', obviously a slug proof variety, so although I have a teeny tiny squash harvest this year, it's very colourful and my hoarding instincts are fulfilled.
Now we just need more logs and a big bag of wool and we are sorted for winter.  Simple pleasures.

life outdoors

We've been doing a lot of this lately....it's lambing time, hooray.  Nothing beats cuddling a warm, woolly lamb to tell you that it's spring.

Time to start allotmenting and lining up seed packets, planning all the yummy veg that we will be transporting home by the wheelbarrow full later in the year (always good to be optimistic in the spring, don't you think).

Every time I have passed a packet of squash seeds through the winter I've found myself at the till, 'investing' in another variety, because we really love to eat them and now I find I have enough seeds to start a squash plantation - never mind the other veg. that I'm going to have to squeeze in around them.

It's also hard to see much printing happening over the next few weeks as the call of the soil has started, although I have signed up for our local arts trail and various other projects over the coming year and probably can't put the same pictures up as last year, can I?

multiples of everything

I'm really enjoying having multiples of everything at the moment - squashes, apples, onions, potatoes and as it's still so warm we have several quails eggs each day.  It means I don't have to think about meals until ten minutes before cooking time and I can also be very negligent about ever visiting shops as there is always something hearty to eat on a damp autumn evening.

Tonight we are off to the local fireworks display and I'm sure multiple sausages in rolls will be consumed...